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Ethnography in Post-Franco
Spain: the View of an Outsider
The usual difficulties of doing
fieldwork in a new site were
compounded by two factors:
the nature of the kind of anthropological information about
rural Spain available outside
the country; and the very limited amount of intercommunication in the public sphere concerning political issues in the
early years of the Transition.
The article describes the discussions taking place in anthropology at the time of the fieldwork,
and proposes that a long prior
period of selective repression
explains the differing ways in
which informants spoke of the
historical past and the political
present.
[Spanish Transition,
ethnographic method,
politics]
article
Gavin Smith
University of Toronto
[email protected]
I did one year of ethnographic fieldwork in the extreme south of the
Province of Alicante between the autumn of 1978 and August 1979 and I
continued doing fieldwork in the region, returning frequently for extended
periods up to 1996, when I was joined by Susana Narotzky. The book we
wrote together, Luchas Inmediatas (2010), covers the period of the Transition
in great detail, and I have also devoted a chapter in Intellectuals and (Counter-)
Politics to “History’s absent presence in the everyday politics of contemporary rural Spain” (Smith, 2014: 129-149). So in this article I will restrict my
account to just the one first year of that study. This allows me to emphasise
the distinct foreign-ness of my perspective, and it also serves to highlight some
of the issues that face anthropological fieldworkers in similar settings.
In a small rural town around that period, just three years after the death
of the caudillo, people did not have the habit of talking about public issues,
politics or local and national history. I arrived as an outsider who had only
visited Spain once before and whose particular approach in social anthropology was strongly marxist. These three factors –the extremely limited
familiarity local people had with intercommunicative practice in the public
sphere, the ignorance about rural Spain of the newly-arrived foreigner, and
the persecution in Spain of anything even remotely to do with Marx– combined to influence my initial fieldwork experience. I will speak of all of these
Ethnography in Post-Franco Spain: the View of an Outsider 47
in what follows, but I would like to make the reader aware
of the chronology of my experience by describing the immediate impressions as I began my fieldwork and then move
to my more analytic interpretations of what I was seeing.
But to begin with I would like to describe to the
reader the baggage of anthropological reading that I
brought with me as I entered Spain, because it is important for the Spanish reader to know what the broader
setting of Left anthropology was like at that time.
In Anglophone and francophone anthropology at
that time the move towards a more marxist-influenced
anthropology that had begun in the mid-sixties was still
quite strong. In France figures like Claude Meillassoux
and Maurice Godelier were considered among the more
important anthropologists and even Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1955) admitted that he could not begin a day of writing
without first reading a few pages of Marx to get him in
the right frame of mind. In the United States criticism of
the war on Southeast Asia produced people who referred
to themselves as ‘radical anthropologists’ and a major rift
occurred in the American professional association when
they exposed other anthropologists who were aiding the
military in that war. Even so many of these anthropologists did not take Marx as an inspiration for their work. It
must be remembered that, although not as violent as in
Spain, the repression of ‘marxism’ (very broadly defined)
was pervasive in the U.S even in the late sixties. As a result
anthropologists employed self-censorship by using the
term ‘political economy’ as a code word for an approach
that was strongly influenced of by Marx1. But except
for a few of the older generation like Eleanor Leacock,
Stanley Diamond, Eric Wolf and June Nash, and a
younger generation like Carol Smith, Donald Donham
and William Roseberry, careful engagement with Marx’s
epistemology was not a feature of most American ‘political economy’.
In Britain the two major universities –Oxford and
Cambridge– followed their long-standing belief that
what was happening in the rest of the academic world
was of little importance to them and a quite traditional
kind of anthropology held dominance. The two other
universities where there was a strong tradition of anthropology, London School of Economics and Manchester,
were considerably more open and their departments
more heterogeneous. At Manchester the major figure,
Max Gluckman, had long been sympathetic to marxian approaches and Ronald Frankenburg was openly
sympathetic to a strongly marxist kind of anthropology.
At the LSE young graduate students were greatly influenced by the marxist approach of Maurice Bloch (1983)
himself carrying with him the French aura.2
Of course in Mexico, where the discipline of anthropology was much more generally influential both in
government and in critical political debates than in these
other countries, marxian anthropology had a long history. Indeed major figures in Mexican anthropology, some
of them exiles from Franco’s Spain, very significantly
influenced American anthropologists like Eric Wolf and
June Nash. In Andean south America the role of a radical kind of anthropology (marxist or not) often depended
upon whether or not the department was to be found
in an elite (often Catholic) university or in a university
with greater popular access. Thus in Peru, where I did
my first fieldwork, the established anthropologists at La
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú followed almost rigidly the old anthropology traditions of the past, especially
structural-functionalism but also an almost mystical kind
of Catholic anthropology. Meanwhile, at La Universidad
Nacional de San Marcos, anthropology as political economy
1 Political economy’ in anthropology is still frequently a
coded mystification of the influence of Marx. It allows writers to take authority from Marx at one moment and distance themselves from him at another, as they choose.
2 Ignasi Terradas took his PhD from Manchester. Josep
Llobera was a major influence among graduate students at
the LSE and was one of the founders of the journal, radical
at the time, Critique of Anthropology.
1. Political economy in
anthropology beyond Spain
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48 Gavin Smith
was entirely pervasive, students being encouraged to read
Mariátegui (1928) and Arguedas (1968), just as much as
the more mainstream anthropologists.
2. Anglophone anthropology of
Spain
I provide this background partly because it explains
the frame of mind with which I arrived in Spain in the Fall
of 1978, and partly to place Spanish anthropology in a
more global setting. To put it bluntly I doubt if any of these
anthropologists would have been able to teach in Spain at
that time. The only two figures associated with anthropology who were read beyond the Pyrenees were Caro Baroja,
who was more of an ethnologist than a social anthropologist, and Lisón Tolosana who had been trained at Oxford
and wrote in a dismal structural functionalist manner that
managed to describe the pseudonymous town of Belmonte
de los Caballeros (1966) as if nobody had suffered repression
nor anybody practised the kind of miserable selective terror that was the daily life of Franco’s Spain at least for the
period that the monograph covered.
Two books of major importance had extraordinary
influence on the image anthropologists held of Spain.
These were Mediterranean Countrymen edited by Julian
Pitt-Rivers and Ahmad Mustafa Abu Zaid, which had
an extensive essay by Caro Baroja on the culture of the
Spanish understood as ‘folk’; and Honour and Shame in the
Mediterranean edited by Jean Peristiany. We learned from
these books and the monographs that followed, that there
were essentially only two matters of interest for anthropologists in Spain. These were ‘patron-client relations’
and ‘honour and shame’. Despite the glaring facts of its
geography we were told that Spain was a ‘Mediterranean
country’. In this way it came within the field of study of
traditional anthropology, that is the study of societies perhaps not always themselves exotic, but at least with strange
practices and beliefs that distinguish them from ‘us’.
So it is important to convey the effect this had on an
anthropologist arriving in Spain with a view to speaking
article
with colleagues before deciding where and how to begin
ethnographic research. On the one hand my experience in
South America had given me an exaggerated sense of the
degree to which anthropologists with greater or lesser influence from Marx were engaged in what we might term ‘the
national project’; on the other hand the knowledge I had
gained of Spain through my reading of English-language
ethnographies of the country were so far from my own interests that they seemed to provide a kind of fantasy world
not so far from what we might read today by Ruiz Zafón.
‘Class’ was confined to status and anyway was obscured
by the supposedly pervasive practice of patron-client relations. ‘Ethnicity’ as a category distinct from the rationality
of urban Man (sic) was either something common to all
Spaniards (‘beyond the Pyrenees’) , or was understood in
terms of the ‘folklore’ of remote regions, such as Galicia,
the Basque country, or rural Andalucía. And gender relations had only one form of expression: that between the
honour of men and the shame of women.
3. Introduction to the fieldsite
On my arrival in Spain, in September 1978, I was
extremely fortunate in having met Joan Martínez Alier
while I was working in Peru and I had read everything
I could find that he had written (both about Spain and
elsewhere). I had also met –very briefly and on an earlier
visit– a young but immensely knowledgeable graduate
student called Ignasi Terradas. Martínez Alier soon introduced me to Joan Frigolé. There were of course very few
anthropologists in Spain at that time and none of them,
as far as I know, in dedicated anthropology departments.
The ‘liberal sciences’ not to mention the social sciences
did not sit well with the militaristic and Catholic world
view of Spain during the dictatorship. But I had the sense
that Frigolé was among the few anthropologists in Spain,
who was doing extensive fieldwork over quite a long period: that is, in the tradition that I was used to as a Britishtrained anthropologist. So he was able to give me excellent guidance and suggested that I begin by speaking with
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Ethnography in Post-Franco Spain: the View of an Outsider 49
various professors at the University of Valencia. While
Josepa Cucó was then conducting fieldwork in Valencia,
generally the people I spoke to were geographers and
economic historians.
Knowledge of the material aspects of the physical
body of Spain was integral to the caudillo’s vision of governance and, as a result, an especially thorough, detailed
geography thrived, although its empiricism was minimally
shaped by any theoretical ambitions. These geographers
were extraordinarily helpful to me in selecting a fieldsite in
the extreme south of Alicante. But I was struck by an interesting distinction between these scholars who tended to be
quite familiar with details of the current regional situation,
and others working in the social and human sciences who
were just beginning to engage in work driven by theoretical
debates across Europe. Economic historians, many of them
at last able to work openly on the specific characteristics of
the Valencian economy, were at an especially exciting moment in those days, testing out new theories and ideas and
critiquing the biased theories of capitalist development
coming from northern Europe. But their knowledge of the
present did not match that of their geography colleagues.
So, given the sparsity of research funds and the lack of
recognition of anthropology as an independent discipline
(unlike either sociology on the one side or folklore on the
other) there was very little long-term fieldwork-based ethnography happening in Spain. Theory was exuberant and
exciting as it began to break out of the Francoist straightjacket, but initially it tended to occur without the support
of grounded empirical research (except that produced for
the effective functioning of the declining regime3).
This then was the Spain I entered as I began my
fieldwork in the Bajo Segura in 1978. Let me begin
with first impressions, before moving to my attempts
at analysis and its limitations.
The first thing to note, in comparison with other
articles in this collection, is my relative ignorance. This
was of course my own fault but it was also the result of
3 I use the term ‘declining regime’ because Francoism did
not die with Franco and the Transition was by no means a
‘new start’.
the literature that had emerged from Spain to be read
abroad during the previous twenty years, and this included anthropology4, but I want to stress that the problem of
this ignorance –perhaps just as great as many anthropologist find as they arrive in the field– was compounded by
the severe restrictions on free and open discussion among
people in the Bajo Segura at that time. A central part of
my research plan was to collect life histories by means
of a framework I had developed while in Peru. There I
had collected over a hundred such abbreviated histories
and I followed these up with in-depth discussions with
especially interesting cases. Now I expected that, with the
caudillo dead for three years, people would be delighted to
talk with me about their life stories and I fully intended
to use the same method as I had in Peru. It did not take
long for me to discover that most people were simply unwilling to participate in the interviews; some expressed
enthusiasm in principle but became vague and impatient
if I actually tried to do the interview; others –the elite of
the town– were quite willing but there were vast gaps in
the stories they told me.
But what, precisely, was it that I wanted to talk
to people about? No ethnographer arrives in the field
without a particular focus or a set of questions to be answered and I had decided to come to this part of Spain
for a particular reason. In my earlier fieldwork in Peru
(Smith, 1989) I had been surprised by the way in which
working people with both agricultural and non-agricultural occupations and in both the country and the
city had joined together in a political struggle against
a dominant class. I had expected that a real proletariat
had been freed from the means of production (usually
through being driven off the land) and as a result were
forced to sell their labour to mostly urban capitalists.
4 On the other hand three major books on Spain by English historians were available in Spain by the time I arrived.
These were the Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas 1961,
Ronald Fraser, Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros (1979) and a
translation of a much earlier book, The Spanish Labyrinth: an
Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil
War by Gerald Brennan, published in 1941.
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50 Gavin Smith
But this was not what I found. Instead I found that rural
agriculturalists and pastoralists combined with their migrant colleagues working in the cities and together they
undertook a successful struggle against land-owners.
So I had chosen to come to the País Valenciano because there had been a long history of often quite intensive
agriculture (aided by irrigation) combined with small rural
manufacturing. And this pattern continued to the present
(i.e. the 1970s). So my central concern in my fieldwork
was to study the nature of working class relations across the
agriculture/industry divide. To do so I would have to talk
to many different kinds of workers and I would have to
find ways of studying the relations between them and their
employers. And I would have to place what I found in the
broader social and political setting of Spain –not just in the
present, but as things had unfolded over the past years.
This all seemed obvious to me. It was simply a matter of getting down to work and recording what I found.
By this time in my career I had rejected both British and
French versions of ‘structuralism’ and, influenced by anthropologists like Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, and historians like Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson, my
idea of ethnography was that it should be a historical study
of the present in terms of political economy: in other words,
asking questions that would help me to understand reality in marxian terms (for greater detail, see Narotzky
and Smith, 2006). This will no doubt strike the Spanish
reader familiar with those times as a point-of-view very
far removed from the ordinary discourse prevailing in rural Spain then. But, as I have said, my naivety at that time
was both partly a weakness of my own but, more importantly for this issue of the journal, it was a result of what
little was known about Spain. The possibility of basing
my ethnography on discussions of the past fifty years of
history was, of course, going to be deeply problematic as
the shadow of Franco’s rule stretched darkly across the
present, especially I would say, in the countryside. And
then to add to this my assumption that I would record
both the history and the present by means of marxist
terms –the tensions of class, exploitation, merchant capital and so on– was simply absurd.
article
The absurdity, or at least the obstacles in my way,
did not initially surprise me. I had grown up in a small
village in the centre of England and, while questions
about history would have troubled nobody, questions
about class and exploitation, even if veiled in other
terms, would have been quite offensive to people. So
I was not initially discouraged by what I found. It was
only as I began to produce a richer and more profound picture of the town and the region that first the
contradictions emerged, and then the difficulties of
acquiring the information I needed became manifest.
In fact in a superficial way it was much easier to ‘see’
the class differences in the Bajo Segura than it would have
been in my own village in England. In my own village very
few people would actually speak of real class (or, more
accurately, status) differences, even where they obviously
existed. With a number of Labour governments behind
us, since the Second World War, ordinary people tended
to be quite dismissive of the difference between the gentry (los caballeros, los señoritos) and themselves. By contrast, it
quickly became clear in the Bajo Segura that there were
an old class of señoritos who had been well-established as
quite large landowners or tenants since the end of the Civil
War. They were joined by those who more recently had
acquired land or had been successfully running one of the
many small manufactories in the region, or made money
as agricultural wholesalers and transporters. These were
quite clearly the elite of the village all of whom had benefitted from the years of Franco, some more from the earlier
years, some more from the later years. Then there were the
shop-keepers, minor professionals, middle-sized land-owners or tenants, and those who owned small workshops, who
constituted a locally acknowledged ‘middle-class’. Finally,
anybody who earned a wage was working class, although
there was a clear qualitative difference between those who
worked in small factories and workshops and the jornaleros
in agriculture.
This was my initial impression and it included issues of gender. The people I first spoke to tended to tie
the class or status of an adult woman to the occupation
of their husband, though this changed along a spectrum
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Ethnography in Post-Franco Spain: the View of an Outsider 51
as one moved from the top to the bottom of the social
scale. Among shop-keepers and others like them, husband and wife tended to work together in the family
enterprise, while for ‘working class’ people, women both
took in homework from the local factories, often thereby
becoming the main income earners, and also worked as
jornaleras though usually on a more seasonal basis than
their husbands and depending on the demand for their
home-work. In fact, despite the Anglophone literature
on ‘honour and shame’, I was comforted by the fact that
women in the Bajo Segura appeared to me to have far
more control over the domestic sphere than I think I
would have found in my own village in England, and this
increased as one moved from the petit-bourgeois small
shopkeepers to the various kinds of proletariat.
4. From first impressions to
preliminary analysis
As the months passed, this initial framework became more
complex and barriers I had not anticipated at the beginning began to arise. Perhaps what illustrates this best is to speak of my
discovery of the spatial topography of the town. I had initially
settled on Catral as the base for my study of the area, as opposed
to a number of neighbouring towns, because it was the only one
where I found a house to rent for me and my family. Yet the
location of this house immediately directed my initial fieldwork
interactions. It was a street in the centre of the town made up
of a number of shops, the homes of work-distributors for the
shoe industry, as well as a variety of others. Crossing this street at
right-angles and running the length of the main part of the town
was a street made up of the somewhat more splendid houses
of the larger land-owners and tenants as well as professionals
such as the doctor and the mayor who had a senior management
job in an agricultural supply firm in Murcia (and had been appointed to his position during the Franco years).
It was of course easy for me to talk to my neighbours and
get an impression of the town through their eyes. Generally
speaking, Franco himself was almost never mentioned but the
impression people wished to convey to the foreigner was that
Spain was now a ‘modern’ society much like any in Europe, and
in any event southern Valencia was an especially dynamic and
advanced part of Spain. As I walked through the town in search
of people to talk to, the better off land-owners enjoyed taking
the time to educate me about the particular features of the town
and the region. In this case Franco was quite often mentioned
and a frequent anxiety was expressed that there would now be a
decline in social order with less ‘responsible’ people trying to run
things, though it was never made clear what things they might
run. It is interesting to note that the most obvious was the entry
of new people into local political office –which had always been
entirely dominated by the elite–, but the actual entry of openly
competitive elections had to wait until March of 1979 and, up
to a few weeks before that time, it was as though nobody really
thought the politics of elections would actually disturb the order
these people so valued and were so afraid of losing.
There were of course divisions even in this part of
town. The old Casino, for example, was still there and only the
better off shopkeepers would have thought of taking coffee
there. But the really glaring division was between this central
part of the town and a long stretch of small houses running
down a single street to the east. Here every house was occupied by a jornalero family, or families whose members worked
in a small workshop, or a mix of both.
There is no question that the existence of this topography
was a result of the way the local political economy had been
organized during Franco’s government. Moreover it conformed
also to the kind of talk that occurred in each space: ordinary
chatter about daily and local business issues among people on
my own street; a desire to impart to me a coherent and quite
well-planned narrative of local society by the elite; and for the
first few months of my fieldwork no discussion at all between me
and the jornaleros/as in the barrio where they lived, much as I
tried. For some this may have resulted from a real suspicion of
what I was doing, both as an outsider and also as somebody who
lived among a certain group of people in the town. But for most,
it was simply the fact that they were not used to anybody listening to their opinions or taking what they said seriously.
I want to convey this sense of the first months in rural
Spain in the early years of the Transition because the emergence of many years of repression that began with extreme
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52 Gavin Smith
article
and quite selective violence and then moved into a routine of
ordinary taken-for-granted fear and the care that this generated, produced this kind of superficial normality. As I have said,
of course, what appeared normal was expressed differently
by the chattering shop-keepers, the authoritative language of
the elite, and the near-silence of the jornaleros/as. And the way
the Transition was managed from above, the compacts made
among the leaders of the political parties, the items on the news,
the continued respect for the very people and institutions that
had not just colluded but had managed and benefitted from
the dictatorship –the church, the military, even the education
system as it reached a town such as this one– these all served to
legitimate these different arenas as normal public discourse.
The atmosphere this created for all but the jornaleros/as
party lists began to be circulated and candidates began to make
themselves known. It was assumed by virtually everybody I
spoke to that the UCD under Suárez would win. The argument
for voting for UCD candidates had nothing to do with Suárez’s
political platform. Rather people felt that it was important to be
represented by somebody who could tap the shoulder of the
people in power and get something done. By contrast, one could
vote for the PSOE because one was sympathetic to the Socialists,
but it would be a wasted vote, because they would not get in and so
would have no influence on government. In other words people
found it hard to have faith that even the limited ‘democracy’ of
a government-and-opposition would actually work. There was
in fact very little discussion, either at the political meetings or
in the street, about the different policies the candidates would
was in some ways rather contradictory. On the one hand there
was an assurance that Spain –in this instance Catral and the
region around it– was not going to relapse into the old rigidities
and dogged grey obstinacies of Francoism. On the other hand
there was a parallel assurance that change would be so gentle
that perhaps it would hardly be noticed at all.
The one place where the separated spaces of the town’s
topography came together was the bar where labour was hired
early each morning. This was a large room filled with tables and
chairs and with a bar running down the length of one wall. And
yet even in the bar there was a spatial configuration. The elite
stood at the end of the bar nearest to the entrance. Various people leant along the middle areas and of course people had to
come up to the bar to get their coffees and cognacs. At the far
end were the older men, no longer working. And the room itself
was similarly divided. The area most easily reached from the entrance was taken up by a variety of small farmers. Beyond them,
along the wall opposite the bar the jornaleros sat at tables playing
dominoes, waiting for the possibility of being chosen for a day’s
work. People moved from one table to another to take up conversations but nobody moved from the space of the small farmers
into the space of the jornaleros. And in fact, while I did eventually
spend a great deal of my time with these people and socialized
with them in their barrio, throughout that first year of my fieldwork I never crossed the space in the bar that was theirs.
Although the upcoming elections in March 1979 were
spoken of, it was not until just the month before the elections that
pursue. Those who ran for the UCD presented themselves as the
most technically skilled agents in the region –people who knew
about agricultural prices, or about recent developments in the
shoe industry– and their message seemed to imply that ‘politics’
was unnecessary given their superior skills and knowledge of the
world. Not surprisingly in the later municipal elections the UCD
dominated the council.
I want to stress two points. First there is the question
of the absence of what Habermas would call intercommunicative practice in the public sphere. Second there are the
distortions that resulted from the extreme ignorance of the
foreign fieldworker. Obviously the possibility of solving the
second problem was greatly restricted by the existence of
the first problem.
I think it is very important to convey to people who did
not live in rural Spain at that time –and I include Spanish
people too– the extent to which people did not speak across
the lines I have drawn here. I have proposed two lines –topographical and class-based– and I have suggested that the one
reinforced the other. Of course people did speak across these
lines and also among themselves in the public sphere –on the
street, in the bars, and at official meetings of various kinds- but
what most struck me was how the minutiae of everyday affairs
were used as a means to push out the possibility of any kind of talk
that might raise social or political issues. Among people of much the
same occupational background a habit had grown up that was
not immediately modified by the introduction of a so-called
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Ethnography in Post-Franco Spain: the View of an Outsider 53
‘democracy’. As elections approached I might find myself in
a shop, buying groceries. Somebody might begin to talk about
the possibility that agricultural prices might be improved with
a new government. Immediately others would shift the conversation to the state of this year’s orange crop, or the behaviour
of somebody’s daughter and so on. And across these lines the
habits of life under the dictatorship accounted for a complete
absence of such talk, especially in the case of the jornaleros/as.
If you think about the extremes of the well-established
land-owners on the one hand and the jornaleros/as on the
other, then it is clear that the former were accustomed to
speak openly of their political views and to assume that the
person they spoken to would agree with them –at least superficially. But the jornaleros/as by contrast were accustomed
town and talk to them –not just about politics, but about
their life-histories. In fact, the key moment was when my
research assistant, a socialist, rented a room in the barrio:
at that time people began to understand the kind of work I
was doing, and felt comfortable to talk to me.
to never voicing their political opinions often even among
themselves. For many this was not simply a question of being cautious, it was also the result of a long period in which
this was simply not what one spoke about: almost as though
the physical ability to express one’s views had been unexercised for so long that it did not really work any more.
During the Civil War Socialists and Anarchists had dominated political life in Catral. As a result, the repression that followed was extreme though and –importantly– selective, both of
particular families and particular individuals (see Narotzky and
Smith, 2010; Smith, 2014: 124-149) As a result, while some
families were able to avoid castigation and even manipulate
themselves so as to benefit from the new regime, others were
more savagely dealt with and had no room for manoeuvre. As
the years unfolded, this produced different kinds of habitus for
different groups within the town. In the area of the town in
which I lived this resulted in a kind of banality of ordinary life,
rather than a generalized sense of on-going oppression. But
in the barrio of the jornaleros/as this was not the case. There
the UGT had been operating clandestinely through the later
years of the dictatorship (and even before that) so for many
people there it was not that quite radical socialist political views
were absent, but rather that they were exchanged within a wellprotected and closely guarded cohort.
Obviously this situation distorted the image I produced in my early months of fieldwork. It took a long time
before I was able to relax with people from that part of the
the silencing of histories was a kind of epidemic that even the
foreigner might catch. By the end of my first year of fieldwork,
I myself –the foreigner– had begun to repress what little knowledge I had gained about the effects of repression on people’s
lives. So when Susana Narotzky first went through my fieldnotes and survey material perhaps a decade later, she found
my recordings of people’s references to the dictatorship which
I had entirely silenced in my own mind. Even as I read and
re-read my fieldnotes, I had slipped past my informants’ own
references to the awkward moments of their histories.
I hope I have conveyed some sense of what my experience in that first year (Sept, 1978 to Aug, 1979) of fieldwork
was like. As the years passed, many things changed. The
PSOE came to power and the compromises they accepted
were a disappointment to those who had worked clandestinely on the left to help workers defend the conditions of
the lives. For them the struggle that they and their parents
had undertaken for a real socialist society should now come
to fruition, and they felt disappointed and deserted by the
regional and national political elites of the PSOE. And then
I myself found a Register of those killed by Franco’s regime
during and after the Civil War and, as a result, discovered
that the major prison camp of Albatera was just a few kilometres from where I lived (Smith, op cit). In raising these
kinds of issues, people began to feel able to talk more easily.
But, as I said at the outset, that is another story and one that
can be read elsewhere.
5. After the first year of fieldwork
Given the fact that I was collecting life-histories, inevitably once this fence had been crossed, a wide variety of different people’s activities during and following the Civil War
emerged, from the opportunism of some to the ever-worsening
conditions of others. But an odd thing happened, as though
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54 Gavin Smith
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARGUEDAS, J.M. (1968) Las comunidades de España y
del Perú. Lima: UNAM.
BLOCH, M. (1983) Marxism and anthropology. Oxford:
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LÉVI STRAUSS, C. (1955) Tristes Tropiques. Paris:
Plon.
LISÓN TOLOSANA, C. (1966) Belmonte de los
Caballeros: a sociological study of a Spanish town.
Oxford: Clarendon.
MARIÁTEGUI, J.C. (1928) Siete ensayos de
interpretación de la realidad Peruana. Lima: Amauta.
NAROTZKY, S.; SMITH, G. (2010) Luchas
inmediatas: gente, poder y espacio en la España rural.
Valencia: P.U.V.
PITT RIVERS, J.; ABU ZAID, A.M. (eds) (1963)
Mediterranean countrymen: essays in the social
anthropology of the Mediterranean. The Hague:
Mouton.
PERISTIANY, J.G. (ed) (1965) Honour and shame: the
values of Mediterranean society. London: Weidenfeld
& Nicholson.
SMITH, G. (1989) Livelihood and resistance: peasants and
the politics of land in Peru. Berkeley: University of
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SMITH, G. (2014) Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics:
essays in historical realism. Oxford: Berghahn.
article
Resum
Las habituales dificultades de hacer trabajo de
campo en un nuevo lugar se debían a dos factores:
la naturaleza de la información antropológica sobre
la España rural disponible fuera del país y la limitadísima intercomunicación sobre cuestiones políticas
en la esfera pública durante los primeros años de la
Transición. El artículo describe las discusiones antropológicas que se producían en la época del trabajo
de campo y propone que un largo período previo de
represión selectiva explica los distintos modos en que
los informantes hablaban del pasado histórico y del
presente político.
Resumen
Les habituals dificultats de fer treball de camp en
un lloc nou es devien a dos factors: la natura de la
informació antropològica sobre l’Espanya rural disponible fora del país i la molt limitada intercomunicació
sobre qüestions polítiques en l’esfera pública durant
els primers anys de la Transició. L’article descriu les
discussions antropològiques que es produïen en l’època del treball de camp i proposa que un llarg període
previ de repressió selectiva explica les diferents maneres com els informants parlaven del passat històric i del
present polític.
Palabras clave
Transición española,
política
método
etnográfico,
Paraules clau
Transició espanyola, mètode etnogràfic, política
(con)textos (2016) 6:46-54, ISSN: 2013-0864
© de l’article, Gavin Smith
© de l’edició, Dept. d’Antropologia Social de la Universitat de Barcelona